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Payments
giant Square has acquired San Francisco conversational AI startup Eloquent Labs
for an undisclosed amount with the goal of helping its merchants improve their
customer service.

Square has
been focusing on making tools for sellers to reach buyers in-person, online and
in marketplaces so they can better serve their customers, and its latest
purchase of Eloquent indicates its interest in introducing AI services to its
offering.

Eloquent
was founded in 2016 by two leading Stanford natural language processing (NLP)
researchers, Gabor Angeli and Keenon Werling. In early 2017 it raised $1.5m in
seed funding which it used to develop an AI conversational assistant named Elle
that helps small businesses with common customer service-related issues such as
returns, product tracking and FAQs.

"Eloquent's
conversational AI services are exactly the kind of technology that can level
the playing field for businesses of all sizes by providing sellers efficient
ways to interact with their customers," remarked Square head of seller and
developer business units and infrastructure engineering Alyssa Henry.

"The team
will advance messaging across our entire ecosystem, and together we will build
tools that leverage the latest in natural language processing research,"
she added.